


a different kind of danger

by alamak



Category: The Queen's Thief - Megan Whalen Turner
Genre: Dubious Consent, F/M, Groveling, Light Femdom, but not really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-03
Updated: 2020-07-03
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:53:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,055
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25052713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alamak/pseuds/alamak
Summary: “So,” said the queen, her eyes as slits. “Grovel.”
Relationships: Attolia | Irene/Eugenides
Comments: 23
Kudos: 65





	a different kind of danger

**Author's Note:**

> I have no explanation except that these books have ruined my life and I s c r e a m every time Gen sits at Attolia’s feet

At least he was not dragged before the court this time. 

Instead, he had been on his knees for some time in the private audience chamber of the Queen’s apartments—traditionally the king’s—which was empty except for Eugenides and Attolia herself.

She sat quite still on the high backed chair that served as her throne in here, still glorious in all the trappings of her crown. In her lap, she held his hook and he flushed to see her pale fingers curled around its blade.

She would have him account for his crimes, he knew. He had no answer for it. He had dared to steal her—kidnap her—and while she was in his power he had pressed his advantage and he knew that she would not forget. He had not expected her to.

“You would beg for the queen’s mercy?” They were the first words she had spoken since he had arrived. Her eyes betrayed nothing and he felt a little quiver of fear dart through him, despite himself. 

“I believe I promised your majesty groveling,” he responded lightly, hoping to recapture the spirit of levity he had held briefly that day, though the thought of it still caused a cold echo of despair to shiver through the pit of his stomach.

The air was spun thick with memory, the peace between them a single fragile thread.

“So,” said the queen, her eyes as slits. “Grovel.”

All the breath he had been holding went out of him. “Yes, your majesty.” His heart raced and he dared to lift his eyes from the ornate Medean carpet to the folds of her skirt. 

“Your majesty?” she repeated coolly.

“My Queen,” he rasped, lowering his head. He pressed his paper-dry mouth to the silk of her slipper and felt her twitch, heard the sharp intake of surprise. He didn’t dare look up at her, but placed a second kiss next to the first, nearer to the silver-threaded trim. Her toes curled under his lips.

“My Queen, I—” he did not know what to say. He should have prepared for this, but he had not. And what flattery could he give her that she would accept from him? Certainly not how lovely her hair looked unpinned, nor how it quickened his blood when she looked at him with such scorn as she did now. “How would you have me serve you? I will do anything.”

“To save your skin?” she asked.

“I am attached to it, to be sure,” he shrugged, as if they spoke only of a preferred cloakpin. “But I am more attached to Attolia. What skills are left to me are hers to use.”

When Attolia spoke, after a long silence, her words were deliberate. “And what skills are left to you?” Eugenides followed the line of her index finger as it moved over the flat of the hook in her lap and felt a deep heat rising to his skin. She asked a different question. “What could you steal for me?”

“What would you ask for?” he said by way of an answer. “Trinket or tribute, I would bring you anything you desire. The finest silks and the sweetest wines. Blush orchids and Anani diamonds and black cardamom and saffron from beyond the Middle Sea.” He punctuated each promise with a press of his lips. His tongue curled around the softly jutting bone of her ankle. The weight of her dress fell like a veil over his head.

“Is that all?” She appeared unmoved. “Attolia has gold. I don’t need you to steal me treasure.”

It was a rebuke. A drop of sweat rolled down his neck where his curls had begun to overgrow their crop.

“Not just treasure. Security. The secrets of your barons and anyone else who would threaten your reign,” he promised her. “Susa. Erondites. Astacus. Let me help you bring them to heel.”

“ _ You _ threaten my reign,” Attolia told him, almost indifferently. He fixed his eyes to her face so that he would not have to look at the play of her fingers, nor at the useless stump of his own wrist knocking against her ankle.

He had to concede the point. “I destroyed Sounis’s fleet, I can still give you aid.”

“An act of sabotage for which Attolia was long at war,” she murmured, eyes flashing dangerously. He shivered despite himself. “I have a secretary of the archives who is well compensated to do these services for me already,” she told him what he already knew, lifting his head up with just her two fingers light under his chin.

He rested his cheek against her knee and stared up at her. So close, he could smell citrus and jasmine and he wondered if she perfumed the backs of her knees as some women did. He was so aroused it was hard to think from it. Feeling courageous, he kissed her again, just above the inside of her knee, dampening the fine linen of her dress. 

She kicked at him, not as hard as she might have, and he fell back onto his elbows. 

“You would that I make you a king, yet you come to me as a whore,” she said, voice calm.

He flushed to hear her call him so.

“I only want to serve you, my queen,” he said truthfully. Pathetically. “I would serve you.”

“And what of Eddis?” she asked him, eyes dark as night.

“I would serve Attolia,” he repeated.

She stared into his face a long while as he braced himself there, painfully aware of how obvious his arousal was. Eventually, she was apparently satisfied with what she saw and she leaned back in her chair.

“Very well.” She caught the edge of his chin with a slippered foot. “Serve me.”

Weak with a relief that surprised him, he returned to the place at her feet, kneeling before her and wetly kissing her delicate ankles, her pale calves, pushing up her skirts as his oblations moved up her legs.

Her knees fell open under his mouth and he smothered his pleasure at this small victory against her skin. There were dark marks on the inside of her thigh and he pressed his lips against each one. 

She was wet and it was a shock to him, though he had been doing his best to make her so. Attolia glistened and how could he ever have imagined himself anything but a thief, to want to steal something so precious, so shining. He licked into her folds, knowledgeable and deliberate.

One of her hands was on her knee, gripped so tightly that the knuckles had gone bone white. She was close then. 

Her taste consumed him, lit him wholly with lust. How he loved her. He wrote it into her, tracing with his tongue in the archaic, in the demotic, telling her in the only way he had left to him. When his mouth closed around her, sucking hard, Attolia finally made a sound, gasping as she peaked and her muscles tensed all around him.

She released him and he gazed up at her through his eyelashes, mouth red and shining. Her hand brushed his forehead, smoothing back a lock of hair, then was gone so quickly he might have imagined it. Attolia lifted an eyebrow.

Eugenides grinned and set his mouth back to her. His tongue moved across her folds like a thief, darting into corners and crevasses, plunging her secrets, unlocking the smallest sounds as he used his tricks to set all her pins and tumblers to rights. When she tightened around him a second time, he did not pause to laud his success or to moon further over her narrow ankles and pale thighs.

Attolia was not as still now. Her breath came more uneven and her skin was flushed. His jaw was beginning to ache, but he had a promise to keep and no mortal force could have convinced him to abandon it.

He continued on, stubbornly, until she had shaken apart on his tongue for a third time, her thighs clenched so tight around his ears that all he could hear was the pounding rush of his own blood, like the sea, drowning out even the memory of fear.

Darkness danced in front of his eyes but he continued to lap at her until he felt fingers in his hair and he was pulled back.

“Breathe, Eugenides,” she commanded, and she was his queen and he obeyed.

He was on the floor now and he realized that she was by him and that she held his head in her lap. The back of her hand brushed his wrist like an accident and he could not have moved if Hephestia herself had called to him.

She touched him. Her palm pressed flat against the line of his arousal under his clothes. The scent of her hair oil overwhelmed him. He closed his eyes, unable to bear it.

“You would have my mercy, but not in this?” she asked, and her voice was a still pool, revealing nothing. He hardly dared to hope.

“Only if it pleases you, your majesty,” he whispered.

After a moment, he felt her fingers wrap around him. Her hand renewed its rhythm, palm soft and so tight he feared he might humiliate himself at the first stroke.

“You are too generous,” he sighed, so that he would not weep against her lap. “Too clever, too lovely.”

“And kind?” she asked sharply, into his ear.

“Oh yes,” he panted, “Oh, my queen.” He trembled under her hand.

“Thief.” She commanded him. Mustering all of his courage, he opened his eyes and caught the dagger’s edge of her smile, slivered like the moon. With a cry like a sob, he erupted, spilling hot over her hand and shooting into the air.

After, they lay together on her bed, curled face to face, their knees pressed close against each other. Her hand rested cool against his cheek and his own touched lightly the skin over her ribs, brushing softly over the side of her breast as his thumb navigated the hills and valleys of the bones there.

“So that was your plan then,” she said, voice as low as the candlelight.

“Less a plan, my queen, and more the last fevered fantasies of a man sure he went to a painful death,” he told her quietly, and she flushed.

“I doubt that’s quite the fate your father feared when he tried to strangle you,” she said dryly.

He winced and did not contradict her.

“I left bruises yesterday,” he referred to the marks he had kissed on her thigh, scattered across her left leg like dark constellations. “You should have told me.”

Attolia said nothing, but her eyes dropped scornfully to his right wrist.

He blushed, invisible in the dim light, struck dumb as usual by that expression. Her hand brushed over his face, lingering.

He lifted her eyes to her, almost shy. “Did I save my skin?”

Attolia stilled, her fingers fixed like stone to where they were touching his cheek. “As you said, you are very good at groveling.” She kissed his shoulder and then the shell of his ear, very gently. He drew closer, following the warmth of her skin as a heliotrope to the sun and she put her arms around him. “I am glad we didn’t test your word that day.”

“Why not?” he demanded, more curious than offended.

The silence lasted long enough that he had begun to think that she would not answer and that the question would be another thing unspoken between them, a moon secret dedicated to the goddess of night. Finally he felt one of her hands slip down to the small of his back. “I do not suppose the outcome would have been so pleasurable for either of us. For one, I would hardly have granted you a private audience.”

He huffed and dug his elbow into her side and was relieved to hear her breath even out. “For another,” she continued more briskly, “you didn’t master that trick with your tongue until quite recently.” 

Eugenides laughed. “So. How fortunate that we were able to rely on you then,” he murmured, capturing her hand to press his lips to it. He touched one of her earrings. “My Queen.”


End file.
